A Call to Spy

I absolutely love movies about espionage during World War II so I was pretty excited when I saw the trailer for A Call to Spy which is based on actual events.  I finally had a chance to see it last night and I really enjoyed it.  After the Nazi occupation of France, Churchill is feeling desperate and authorizes the training of female spies because he thinks they will be more inconspicuous.  Vera Atkins (Stana Katic), a glorified secretary for the SOE (the newly formed spy agency), is tasked with finding suitable candidates.  She finds Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas), an American working at the U.S. embassy in London who wants to be a diplomat but is constantly turned down because she has a prosthetic leg, and Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), a Muslim from an aristocratic Indian family who is a pacifist but also a skilled radio operator.  They are given minimal training and dropped into France with almost no support but Virginia is able to develop a vast network of local resistance fighters and Noor is able to send messages to London while on the run before narrowly evading discovery time after time.  Meanwhile, Vera struggles to be taken seriously within the SOE because she is hiding a dangerous secret.  They overcome many hardships but it is when the women are betrayed that they become true heroes and change the course of the war.  I love the fact that this is a story that has not been told before, but definitely deserves to be, and I found it to be incredibly compelling.  The pace moves quickly with a lot of tension and, because all of the characters are so sympathetic, I was very invested in the outcome.  In fact, I felt genuine distress during moments of peril and a lot of admiration for what these women go through.  Even though many of the actors in this movie are not very well known (at least to U.S. audiences), all of the performances are great and I was especially impressed with Thomas who is very affecting.  I highly recommend this inspirational story of bravery and perseverance.

Note:  After watching this movie I really wanted to know more about these three women.  I found out that Miss Moneypenney from the Bond movies is based, in part, on Vera Atkins.